Jehangir Ali 
Srinagar: With his bail application due to be heard by a New Delhi court this week, the possible return of Engineer Rashid, the incarcerated leader of the Awami Ittehad Party (AIP), to the electoral scene ahead of the assembly election has set the rumour mill churning in Kashmir Valley.
While there are rumours that Rashid could be transferred to Srinagar’s central jail, some speculate that the courts could grant him another parole, like they did in the case of Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, to enable him to campaign for his party ahead of the three-phased assembly election in Jammu and Kashmir which will be held next month.
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that the legal principle, ‘bail is rule, jail is exception’, was applicable even for suspects held in serious offences under special statutes such as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act under which thousands of suspects have been arrested after 2019 when J&K was bifurcated into two union territories.
“Without Engineer Rashid, the assembly election in Jammu and Kashmir will be meaningless, given the mandate that people gave to him in the Lok Sabha election. The court should consider this fact. We are hopeful that he will get bail,” AIP spokesperson Firdous Baba told The Wire.
The firebrand AIP leader and former J&K legislator handed a shocking defeat to the former J&K chief minister Omar Abdullah in the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections. Rashid, who has in the past called for holding referendum for resolving the Kashmir issue, defeated Omar with a margin of more than two lakh votes by polling 472481 votes while Peoples Conference chairman Sajad Lone stood at third position with 173239 votes.
Rashid’s landslide victory marked a significant break in the behaviour of Kashmir’s electorate who have largely stayed away from electoral politics following the eruption of insurgency in the early 1990s, but came out to vote in large numbers for the AIP leader against the backdrop of an emotional election campaign run by his two college-going sons.
Rashid’s stunning win shook the political landscape of Kashmir. Omar said that his victory will “without doubt .. empower secessionists and give Kashmir’s defeated Islamist movement a renewed sense of hope.” Strategic experts argued that the victory of Rashid will “embolden Kashmir’s separatists.”
However, many political observers argued that the “soft separatism” peddled by the likes of Rashid, who doesn’t shy away from advocating talks between India and Pakistan for the resolution of Kashmir problem, like Kashmiri separatists and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) led by Mehbooba Mufti do, has always been part of J&K’s political discourse, given the region’s troubled history.
They point to the time of National Conference founder Sheikh Abdullah who set up ‘Plebiscite Front’ to seek a referendum in Kashmir following the partition of the sub continent in 1947. “Unlike separatists, Rashid used non-violent means to propagate his politics. At the peak of recent unrests in Kashmir, his Langate constituency in north Kashmir remained relatively peaceful,” said a Srinagar-based political analyst, who didn’t want to be named.
The rumours of Rashid’s return to Kashmir’s electoral arena are floating as a time when the Jamaat-i-Islami, which is believed to be the ideological mentor of Hizbul Mujahideen, Kashmir’s biggest militant group, has announced that it was willing to enter the electoral fray, provided the union government lifts the ban which was imposed on the outfit ahead of the bifurcation of Jammu and Kashmir into two union territories in 2019.
Jamaat, a pro-Pakistan group which is also involved in social work in J&K, derives its ideological underpinnings from the teachings of Islamist ideologue and scholar Syed Abul Ala Maududi, “But history tells us that Jamaat was tamed when it got formal entry into the system,” the political analyst quoted above said.
There are reports that the AIP is gearing to contest the assembly election on a “grand scale” and the party was likely to field its candidates on all the constituencies of Kashmir. The possibility of Jamaat joining hands with the AIP has also not been ruled out. Rashid’s brother, Khurshid Ahmad Sheikh, a government teacher and acting president of the party, is also reportedly entering the political fray from a north Kashmir constituency.
Rashid, who is currently languishing in New Delhi’s Tihar Jail, was booked under the stringent anti-terror law and arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) along with Kashmiri businessman Zahoor Ahmad Watali and a host of separatist leaders including the JKLF chairman Yasin Malik and others in a terror funding case in 2019.
In July this year, after the NIA gave its nod to the AIP leader’s bail application, a Delhi court granted him a conditional, two-hour parole to allow him to be sworn in as a member of the Lok Sabha.